1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a check method, program, and system that use computer processing for a specification document existing in a computer readable format.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years methods have been proposed for the automation of checking specification documents during a System Integration (SI) project by taking advantage of software tools running on a computer system. However, the method for specifying the locations to check and method of describing contents of the check have not been determined for specification documents that are not described in a formal format according to certain rules, and automation of the specification document checking is difficult.
The limitations of a completely formal description format are excessively severe. Therefore, cost is incurred for training the responsible personnel, the description of the specification document becomes difficult to interpret, and the formal description format is unsuitable in the field.
The lack of progress of automation in large scale SI projects where automatic checking of a specification document would play an important role has caused problems such as delaying the development process, or triggering of severe software bugs.
In the field of development of large scale SI projects, the specification document is frequently described according to a semi-formal template that is a Microsoft Excel file or something similar that has a determined approximate format. However, due to the aforementioned reasons, specification document checking is difficult to automate, and thus persons still perform specification document checking visually item-by-item, and work productivity has been poor.
A technical breakthrough is needed that would make possible efficient automatic checking that targets a large volume specification document that are described based on a template.
Japanese Patent Application No. 2009-64339 discloses mechanical checking for quality and degree of completeness of items that are described by a design specification document by using a word extraction unit for extractions of words from the created design specification document in order to check contents of the specification document, measuring appearance frequency of the extracted words, and comparing a characteristic word indicating a characteristic of the design specification document that was stored beforehand by a completeness check unit and a threshold value for the degree of appearance of this characteristic word.
Japanese Patent Application No. 2010-118050 relates to an automatic method for searching patent literature rather than checking a specification document. This discloses a system that includes: a morpheme analysis unit for performing morpheme analysis with respect to patent literature data stored in a database, a statistical information calculation unit characterized as selecting a characteristic word by weighting entropy and appearance frequency of a word with respect to analyzed data, a classifier for mechanical learning of a characteristic word and discrimination between patent literatures, and an extraction unit for extraction of all patent literature belonging to a technical field relating to search output from the discrimination results of the classifier.
“XSL by Demo” from Proceedings of the 2002 Symposium on Applications and the Internet, discloses when an editing operation is performed on a GUI by a user with respect to multiple structured documents (HTML), technology that generates an XSLT file after recording an operation command generated within a tool and adding generalization processing to the operation command. According to this technology, the structured document corresponds to a specification document group, and XSLT corresponds to extraction rules.
These disclosed technologies are background technologies, and these technologies are not used for checking a specification document by a computer, are not adopted for large scale SI projects, and may not be used for checking complex specification documents having a hierarchical structure.